Creatures – Sound Design Project

This week I embarked on a small project to test out some plugins I’ve been looking at over the last month or so, as well as patiently waiting for my home broadband to be connected and drinking even more coffee than is usual.

If you’ve been following my Twitter you’ll know I’m currently part of a small team working on a sci-fi themed game (of which I can say very little at present) and so I’ve been looking at audio manipulation and synthesis techniques that I can direct towards this in the future. The ‘Creatures’ sound design project is a bit of a ‘what if’ scenario that you may or may not find yourself in, aboard some kind of disintegrating shuttle in the depths of the cosmos..

I used a mixture of original recordings and synthesis to create all the sounds in these clips, as well as some new found plugins that have been fantastic additions to my sonic arsenal. My favourite thus far being the Spectral Blur plugin from Michael Norris – check it out here.

It was used on most of the ‘creature’ sounds in these examples, and does a fine job of masking the unrelated original audio, in this case some creaking wooden stairs recorded in my old house…

I also use Massive extensively when designing sounds and for these clips I created the sound of the ship alarms and computer using some simple osc / env combinations. I find Massive incredibly flexible for these sort of tasks, and it’s really fun (and quick!) creating alternate versions of patches and sounds.